I was 20 years old in 1968 and a junior in college. The big concern for guys my age was the Vietnam War. Protected by a draft deferment, we debated the conflict, even as others who had graduated from high school with us were dying in jungles and rice paddies half a world away, their names now inscribed on the monument at the Mall in Washington.
I was opposed to the war even as a freshman in 1965, writing an essay for an obligatory writing class how, with nearly 200,000 troops already committed, I thought it was a bad idea.
My sophomore year I was at the University of Innsbruck for a study-abroad program. One of my adventures was hitchhiking to Vienna and the Austrian consul to Yugoslavia giving me a ride. He took an almost fatherly interest – tell me about yourself, he said, and do stay with my family when we get to Vienna. And, he advised: Stay out of Vietnam. America is going to lose the war and there’s no point in your joining it, let alone getting killed for mistakes of your misguided leaders. That was the fall of 1966.
Back on campus in February 1968, I was sipping coffee and hearing stunning news: the Vietcong had attacked multiple U.S. and South Vietnamese positions. Historians consider the Tet Offensive as the turning point in the war, which nonetheless continued for another seven years.
Now, the 70-year-old me ponders half-century memories and how they jibe (or didn’t) with lived experience. There were so many events in 1968 and, in my mind, all separate; but I’ve now discovered how conjoined they were.
On March 31, just weeks after the Tet Offensive, a bunch of us guys gathered to watch Lyndon B. Johnson’s speech about Vietnam. His decisions, we knew, would have a major impact on our future. The president outlined some long-forgotten tactical measures, made a peace overture to North Vietnam that came to nothing and ended with a bombshell: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
Five days later, Bobby Kennedy came to Notre Dame to launch his Indiana primary campaign for president. Some 5,000 packed the Stepan Center for his speech about poverty, inequality, opportunity and, by the way, eliminating college draft deferments. He was enthusiastically received. I didn’t get into the hall and was outside instead with a thousand others, pushing against the car as the senator left sitting atop the back seat of an open convertible, his arms outstretched, my palm briefly brushing his.
That evening I was at a literary festival where Joseph Heller (author of “Catch 22”), fighting tears, announced that Martin Luther King had just been killed and didn’t know if he could go on. He did speak and for me memory of his lecture today is as vivid as brushing hands with Bobby Kennedy just hours before.
There’s more. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (“Slaughterhouse-Five” and many other books) also spoke at the festival and I was there. It was hilarious, but let him tell it: “…my peak funniness came when I was at Notre Dame… It was in a huge auditorium and the audience was so tightly tuned that everything I said was funny. All I had to do was cough or clear my throat and the whole place would break up… People were laughing because they were in agony, full of pain they couldn’t do anything about. They were sick and helpless because Martin Luther King had been shot two days before… it was in the presence of grief that the laughter was the greatest.”
Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. It was all too much and cities erupted. That summer I drove a delivery truck and was astounded to see Ohio National Guardsmen with combat weapons on the streets of Cleveland, tamping down riots which left a generations-long scar. On August 21, watching TV, I witnessed Soviet troops invading Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring – “Communism with a human face” – something the Kremlin could not abide. Seven days after that, I watched police clubbing demonstrators at the Democratic Convention, what a senator condemned as “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.”
Throughout the year and all over there were protests: Columbia University, UC Berkley, etc., similar demonstrations in Germany, a revolution in France, dozens of students massacred in Mexico days before the Olympics, sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith stunning the world with raised fists at their medal ceremony… and more. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War continued.
But 1968 was not just about Vietnam. There was a long-festering racial issue to be sure, but also associated issues as well. Nationwide demonstrations in France spawned a broad-based social/cultural reformation. The Prague Spring was about freedom, an aspiration Russia blocked for a generation, yet the young people who gave the movement energy in 1968 ultimately prevailed. In Ukraine, poets Vasyl Symonenko, Lina Kostenko and Vasyl Stus were in their 30s then. Boldly challenging censorship and standing up for personal expression, they’re revered as the “Sixtiers” – dissidents who, at great sacrifice, led Ukraine’s cultural revival in the ’70s and ’80s, and ultimate independence in 1991.
In September 1968, I turned 21, enjoying my first (legally purchased) beer and in November voting for the first time. I’m gratified to have been young during a tumultuous year, one that rarely comes, and in generational cycles when it does, is invariably driven by youth and accompanied by song. 1968 certainly was: Mick Jagger was 25; so were Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison and George Harrison; Paul McCartney was 26; Bob Dylan was 27; composer Volodymyr Ivasiuk (“Chervona Ruta”) was 20.
For the past several years, I’ve been watching young people engaged in dramatic movements: the Maidan in Ukraine, anti-corruption demonstrations in Armenia and Slovakia; protests against assault weapon massacres in colleges, schools, concerts, churches and neighborhoods in the U.S.; and sadly similar massacres from global terrorist groups like ISIS pursuing who knows what or “lone wolves” at the Boston Marathon. Each generation is a separate story.
1968 was dramatic: pivotal for many, memorable for me. On Christmas Eve, I watched and listened as American astronauts orbiting the moon and looking back on planet Earth from a view no human had ever had, read from the Book of Genesis. May that remain the iconic memory of a remarkable year.